A federal appeals court has rejected a legal theory that would make it illegal to embed third-party videos on websites.
Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that video bookmarking site myVidster is not liable for embedded copies of videos shared by users on its site.
“Judge Posner’s reasoning is interesting,” notes Ars Technica. “He argues that when you view an infringing video on a site such as YouTube, no one — not you, not YouTube, and not the guy who uploaded the infringing video — is violating copyright’s reproduction or distribution rights. And since simply viewing an infringing copy of a video isn’t copyright infringement, he says, myVidster can’t be secondarily liable for that infringement.”
There may be a violation regarding copyright’s public performance right, but the current law is murky in that area. “The judge called on Congress to help clarify exactly how copyright law should apply in the age of Internet video,” notes the article.
Judge Posner ruled that embedding is not direct copyright infringement. He also ruled that viewing (without copying) is not a violation, since the Copyright Act specifically protects against reproducing and distributing copies.
“In Posner’s view, no matter how many people view a video on a video sharing site, there’s only one violation of the reproduction and distribution right: the original uploading of the video,” reports Ars Technica.
Where it becomes murky is in the legal distinction between “downloading” and “streaming” a video. Additionally, the public performance definition within the Copyright Act is ambiguous and open to interpretation.
“Legislative clarification of the public-performance provision of the Copyright Act would be most welcome,” wrote Posner.
Companies are pushing to reinvent the way viewers discover and share TV programs via new integration with social networking outlets.
“App developers are updating the traditional channel guide to show viewers programs that are uniquely relevant to them based on their social circles,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
TV viewers not only have a virtual water cooler at their disposal for discussing their favorite shows, but now mobile apps help share programs that their friends like based on their preferences.
“We can help people discover what to watch in a fundamentally new way,” says Alex Iskold, chief exec of AdaptiveBlue, maker of social TV app GetGlue. “When you sit down on the couch, you’re wondering, ‘What do I watch?’ These kinds of guides are going to become pretty ubiquitous.”
The apps hope to extend a broader shift for social TV, going beyond the original check-in approach for friends to share information (the article suggests the check-in never achieved a critical mass necessary to launch a viable social community).
“In coming weeks, GetGlue plans to relaunch its app as a social TV guide that will show a scrolling calendar with the shows, movies and sports that users’ might like,” notes WSJ. “It will show whether friends who use the app are watching the same show.”
The GetGlue guide will interact with Facebook’s Connect feature in order to “pull in data from friends, so that the guide becomes fully educated on what people like and watch.”
The companies behind the free apps “are trying to offer complimentary advertising on smartphones and tablets to make money,” explains the article. “For example, if someone is watching a pizza commercial, the app could offer a coupon for the pizza shop on the user’s smart device.”
The article also describes similar social TV apps from companies such as Peel Technologies, Dijit Media and TVGuide.com.
Intel, Cisco and Verizon are investing $3.3 million in R&D at five universities in an effort to improve video delivery over wireless networks.
“The first goal of the Video Aware Wireless Networks (VAWN) program? Find a good way to measure mobile video quality,” reports ReadWriteWeb.
Evaluating subjective video quality in quantitative terms is a challenge, one that involves perceptual issues and technical concerns.
“Because viewers perceive quality differently depending on what they’re watching — sports versus talking heads, for example — quality isn’t about throughput but experience, explained Jeff Foerster, principal engineer and wireless researcher at Intel Labs. That’s why VAWN researchers partnered with psychology departments to better understand how the brain comprehends different kinds of video on various devices,” notes the article.
Video stream algorithms, data compression, caching, network management and data storage are some of the considerations in designing systems that will ideally meet the needs of the most people.
Cooperation between packets of data in a network is also a consideration. “Not all packets need to be treated the same,” says Foerster. “Some packets are more important than others to maximizing perceived video quality.”
To further complicate matters, the video measurements will vary by device. Also, different video formats have different requirements.
Increasing efficiency and quality is a pressing matter, suggests the post: “In 5 years an estimated 90 percent of Net traffic will be video, and 66 percent of mobile traffic will be video. Video traffic is expected to grow 66 times based on the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI), but carriers simply can’t afford to spend 66 times the cost to boost network capacity.”
The project is in year two of its three-year plan and includes research conducted by the University of Texas at Austin, Cornell, University of California San Diego, University of Southern California and Moscow State University.
“A source close to Google tells us that the company has put a stop to all acquisitions related to Google+, at least until the end of this year,” reports TechCrunch.
“This source also tells us that Google is wary of both growing the Google+ team right now and providing the product with any additional resources until January,” adds the post.
However, the traditional Google+ Hawaii offsite meeting is reportedly still on the schedule. It is also worth noting that Google+ has already made significant acquisitions this year including the $100 million Meebo purchase.
Google also acquired automatic friends sorter Katango and social media analytics service SocialGrapple last year.
“The Google+ project itself is not on hold but, if this rumor is indeed correct and Google is cutting back on expanding the team’s resources, this could be an indication that Google+ isn’t doing quite as well as the company’s glowing public comments would indicate,” suggests TechCrunch.
San Francisco area eBay users can now register for the beta release of the company’s new same-day shipping service called eBay Now.
“An iOS app, eBay Now’s beta will let SF residents get $5 same-day shipping on products from local stores,” reports TechCrunch.
To start, the service is restricted to purchases over $25. Early partners include Macy’s, Toys R Us, Target and Best Buy.
“Startups like TaskRabbit and Uber have given consumers a taste of instant gratification, and now it seems eBay wants to deliver the same satisfaction,” notes the post. “We are witnessing the rise of convenience tech.”
The move could provide some competition for Amazon, which recently announced it is planning new warehouses in major cities in order to provide same-day shipping to certain regions.
“If I’m in a big city surrounded by brick-and-mortar stores and want something immediately, why wait days by going with ecommerce unless there’s a super-speedy shipping option?” asks the author. “Yes, so you never have to leave your cave. But eBay Now could turn your briefest impulse into products at your door just hours later.”
“Stopping online piracy is like playing the world’s largest game of Whac-A-Mole,” suggests The New York Times. “Hit one, countless others appear. Quickly. And the mallet is heavy and slow.”
The article cites workarounds to several attempts of copyright protection to illustrate how battling piracy is often futile.
For example, when YouTube launched Content ID for movie studios and TV networks to legitimately upload copyrighted clips, YouTube users placed the videos inside a still photo of a cat that fooled the Content ID algorithm.
When authorities blocked access to BitTorrent site Pirate Bay earlier this year, whacking one big mole led to hundreds of smaller ones.
“In retaliation, the Pirate Bay wrapped up the code that runs its entire Web site, and offered it as a free downloadable file for anyone to copy and install on their own servers,” explains NYT. “People began setting up hundreds of new versions of the site, and the piracy continues unabated.”
Ernesto Van Der Sar, editor of Torrent Freak, says piracy will not go away and recommends that rather than attempting to combat it, companies should be experimenting with new content distribution models.
“There’s a clearly established relationship between the legal availability of material online and copyright infringement; it’s an inverse relationship,” says Holmes Wilson, co-director of Fight for the Future, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing piracy laws from disrupting the Internet. “The most downloaded television shows on the Pirate Bay are the ones that are not legally available online.”
“If every TV show was offered at a fair price to everyone in the world, there would definitely be much less copyright infringement,” he adds. “But because of the monopoly power of the cable companies and content creators, they might actually make less money.”
Hollywood is discovering new ways to leverage social media. When Universal Pictures was getting ready to release its summer comedy “Ted,” for example, the marketing department set up a Twitter account for the film’s teddy bear.
Screenwriters Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild were paid extra to help create social buzz about the film, including authoring Ted’s (often foul-mouthed) tweets.
In addition to the Twitter account, Wild was commissioned to blog via “Ted’s Fuzzy Thoughts.”
Mark Wahlberg even changed his Facebook cover picture to a banner that read “ted is here” (followed by content such as a NSFW video message that Wahlberg’s 600,000 fans could share).
“It worked spectacularly,” notes the Wall Street Journal. “Tracking polls, which movie executives rely on to guide box office expectations, suggested an opening-weekend gross of $35 million to $40 million for the film, which was co-written and directed by Seth McFarlane, creator of ‘Family Guy,’ who also provided the voice for Ted. Instead, ‘Ted’ generated $54 million, catching the industry by surprise.”
Studios are looking beyond Facebook and Twitter as just promotional tools. “They are now developing elaborate social media campaigns early on, sometimes as soon as a film gets greenlit,” notes the article.
“Researchers are conducting deep numerical analysis on posts and tweets to guide marketing decisions, sometimes predicting box office revenue with pinpoint accuracy,” adds WSJ. “They’re looking not just at opening movies, but sustaining their word-of-mouth through subsequent weeks.”
Ted’s Twitter account now has 400,000 followers and the film’s Facebook page has more than 2.7 million fans. “Talking Ted,” now the top entertainment app on iTunes, has been downloaded 3.5 million times.
“Excluding sequels, ‘Ted’ is now the most successful R-rated comedy of all time and this weekend should surpass $200 million in domestic box-office revenue,” concludes the article.
Consumers are faced with a dizzying array of options to catch up with TV viewing as the cable business struggles with windowing strategies across multiple digital platforms.
One frustration for viewers is the inconsistent manner in which their favorite shows are offered online and on-demand.
“What is delaying the multichannel TV world is a complex web of vested interests ranging from the cable and satellite operators that dictate most of the distribution parameters for programming to the studios that hold onto some of the rights to the content they license to the networks,” notes Variety. “Then there are the varying off-air marketing strategies, not to mention just old-fashioned indecision.”
Programmers are faced with ad revenue challenges when considering premiere telecasts, reruns, DVR playback and more.
“Cablers also need to protect their relationships with operators that pay them a fortune in carriage fees,” explains the article. “On the other hand, programmers want to maximize the exposure of their shows in ways that can drive ratings back to on-air, dilute the appeal of piracy and capitalize on the momentum of online video in general.”
The industry’s lack of uniformity has evolved during the dawn of the TV Everywhere era, enabled by over-the-top products and services (and impacted by consumers’ changing expectations).
“What we’re really trying to do as an industry is to get a point of consistent time-shifted product available on all devices and platforms to pay TV subscribers,” said Mike Hopkins, president of distribution at Fox Networks.
“Even as cable/satellite TV carriers like Comcast and DirecTV squabble over dollars and cents with broadcast and cable networks like NBC and Viacom, the very structure of their decades-old business model is under attack from new Internet technologies and services, as well as new government regulations,” reports ReadWriteWeb.
“At stake is the future of how people watch and pay for television and video — and who controls the experience,” notes the article.
The dominance of cable and satellite TV providers is being chipped away by Internet video services like YouTube, streaming Internet TV boxes such as Roku and Boxee, online media distribution venues including Netflix and Hulu, smart TVs and related over-the-top (OTT) platforms.
“The other half of the squeeze on the cable TV industry comes from the ossified business practices of the industry itself,” suggests the article. “Cliffhanger battles for carriage rights that lead content creators to pull their programming from cable and satellite systems if they can’t get a deal they like is shooting the industry in the foot.”
Frustrated consumers (and some lawmakers) are pushing for change to the current bundling model, for example. “Programmers like Viacom typically won’t allow anyone to buy their channels individually, but we hope to change that,” said DirecTV recently.
Some analysts suggest the impending changes do not signal a death toll for cable TV, but rather a transition where mobile devices will be used in conjunction with TVs. We should expect the growth of second screen apps to be a significant influence in this space (and may even help save cable).
“Cable TV’s ratings may fall as OTT becomes more popular, but don’t cancel cable’s season just because the plot is getting a major rewrite,” comments ReadWriteWeb.
The DASH Promoters Group is a newly formed collection of companies and organizations, supported by the European Broadcasting Union, that is working to promote the adoption of MPEG-DASH as an international standard for multimedia delivery over the Internet.
According to the group’s website, they believe the use of this open standard “will accelerate market growth, enable interoperability between content preparation tools, servers, CDNs and end devices, reduce the cost of delivery and eventually benefit the end user.”
During the London Olympics, Belgian broadcaster VRT is offering its audience an opportunity to stream the games via MPEG-DASH. “The public trial allows for a maximum of 1,000 concurrent viewers to watch their favorite sport events on a laptop, smartphone or tablet,” explains the site.
This marks the first live public trial of MPEG-DASH (dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP), which the group hopes will serve as the next step toward adoption of a standard and eventual commercial deployment.
The DASH Promoters Group is facilitating the streaming with DRM content protection — available via the VRT Sporza website — but due to copyright restrictions it will not be available outside the Belgian territory.
“This trial is supported by a number of DASH Promoters Group members,” notes the DASH-PG site. “Encoding is provided by Elemental, Harmonic and Media Excel; streaming origins are courtesy of Wowza and CodeShop, who is also providing encryption; Web clients for PC and Android are supplied by Adobe; and BuyDRM is providing applications for iOS and Android, which incorporate its DRM solution.”
A new geographic region is joining the ranks of Silicon Valley and San Francisco as a hotbed for technology start-ups.
“Silicon Beach” is a 3-mile expanse running from Venice to Santa Monica. It currently serves as home to a collection of start-ups such as Viddy, JibJab, Hitfix, ShoeDazzle, BeachMint and Mogreet.
Most of the young Silicon Beach tech companies share a focus on entertainment, celebrity or mobile innovation.
“Cheaper rents than the Bay Area, better weather and proximity to the beach (most of the start-ups are within two blocks of the ocean) make Silicon Beach an attractive place to be,” reports USA Today. “More than 500 tech start-ups have sprouted in sprawling Los Angeles and its environs, according to members of the L.A. tech scene who have compiled the list online as RepresentLA.com. But most of the action is at the beach.”
“There’s been way more interest from up north about what’s happening here in the last 12 months,” says Michael Yanover, head of business development for Creative Artists Agency. “LA has been under the radar, and it’s finally elevating itself.”
Ashish Soni, a professor at USC’s School of Engineering, and executive director of its Digital Innovation lab, says that many of his graduates are opting for local start-ups rather than heading to Seattle or San Francisco.
The area has a longstanding tradition of innovative pioneers (the article cites Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Jack and Sam Warner), so there are some who question the need for a new name. “Why are we rebranding the best brand in the world?” asks JibJab CEO Gregg Spiridellis. “Los Angeles is an amazing city with such a rich heritage of pioneers using technology to create art. Why can’t we just be Los Angeles? Silicon Beach sounds too hip.”
MIT scientists have developed a new set of software algorithms, a process they refer to as “Eulerian Video Magnification,” which applies spatial decomposition and temporal filtering to deconstruct visual elements of video frames and rebuild them in order to detect hidden information.
“These aspects could include the variations in redness in a man’s face caused by his pulse,” notes Technology Review. The process “can amplify aspects of a video and reveal what is normally undetectable to human eyesight, making it possible to, for example, measure someone’s pulse by shooting a video of him and capturing the way blood is flowing across his face.”
“Just like optics has enabled [someone] to see things normally too small, computation can enable people to see things not visible to the naked eye,” says MIT computer scientist Fredo Durand, a co-author of the research paper.
The team plans to release the software code this summer, and “predicts the primary application will be for remote medical diagnostics, but it could be used to detect any small motion, so that it might let, for example, structural engineers measure the way wind makes a building sway or deform slightly,” notes the article.
The technique works for any type of video footage. However, artifacts such as graininess will also be amplified, so higher quality video will have better results.
ETCentric staffer Phil Lelyveld asks: “Could this be used for video compression algorithm testing and evaluation?”
Yahoo has launched a third major update to its IntoNow second-screen TV app, which now allows users to tag and identify a song that’s playing during a TV show.
The company says the music sync function works with live performances, featured songs, or even background music. For users interested in a particular song, the app can direct them to iTunes or YouTube.
The new release “takes a step back from earlier versions, which were focused on TV discovery and sharing metadata with users,” notes TechCrunch. “It found that users were getting little actual utility out of those features, and they weren’t coming back for more… So the team set about re-imagining ways it could promote more interaction with the app.”
A new feature called CapIt allows users to automatically grab an image from a show and then caption it, with an option to share with friends via Facebook, Twitter or IntoNow.
Another new feature is the ability to create group chats around a particular TV show or event, including an option to set up recurring chats that take place throughout a given season.
IntoNow has been downloaded more than 3 million times. according to Yahoo. The latest update is currently only available for its iOS version.
Viggle, the company that rewards viewers for checking into TV shows from their smart devices, now has one million registered viewers.
Since the mobile app’s launch six months ago, Viggle users have checked in more than 63 million times.
“In exchange for being a couch potato, users receive points that are redeemable for movie tickets and gift cards from places like Best Buy, Amazon, Fandango, iTunes, and Hulu Plus,” explains VentureBeat. “Users can also earn rewards by participating in real-time voting and game features while they watch.”
The New York-based company has released the Viggle Platform Developer Kit (VPDK) for third-party use, that it hopes will enable networks and producers to create social TV experiences that would reside within Viggle’s mobile apps.
Viggle sees potential for complementary and interactive features such as video playlists, news headlines, slideshows, games, polls, prediction cards, “mood-o-meters,” trivia questions and quizzes.
The VPDK is available for free. Developers can work with common Web standards including HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.
To demonstrate the kit’s capabilities, Viggle recently launched “MyGuy,” a real-time fantasy sports game in which users earn points based on how well their selected players perform in a given game.
Fujifilm Australia is looking beyond the concept of digital photo printing with kiosks that enable customers to create special trinkets.
The CE company is developing a consumer 3D printing service intended for shoppers interested in creating their own DIY projects.
“Utilizing the in-store ‘kiosk’ model successfully implemented by Fujifilm for its digital photographs, a range of physical objects will be available for personalization,” reports PSFK.com.
“The catalog of available objects will be rotated to provide variety, but while some retailers may end up with a 3D printer in store, initially these objects are unlikely to be created before the customers’ eyes,” notes the post. “To start, a majority of items will be produced off-site and the customers would need to return to the store to collect their orders.”
The goal is to provide consumers with the opportunity to create a far-reaching range of items through 3D printing technology previously available primarily for professionals (think MakerBot in kiosk form).
“In a retail environment, a customer could use a kiosk to create their customized 3D product from a range of customizable designs or even a photograph, place their order with the retailer and then return to the store at a later time to pick up the product,” explains Michael Mostyn, a key account manager in the commercial division of Fujifilm.
“The prototype consumer kiosk for 3D printing is here,” adds ETCentric staffer Phil Lelyveld. “Once the consumer behavior catches on, it’s just a matter of swapping out the printers as the range of materials, colors, and options expand for a whole new industry to be born.”
